


turn your eyes outwards to the sun

by chuchisushi



Series: the curving path [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Jossed, M/M, Overwatch - Freeform, POV Outsider, genji and lena knew each other fight me, rampant use of headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-11-03 08:50:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10963833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuchisushi/pseuds/chuchisushi
Summary: Some scenes from a life well lived.Takes place during Part 1 ofthe curving path





	1. genji - gibraltar

**Author's Note:**

> while going through my old files i ran across this document that i'd forgotten about that had been sitting around since like, last september. i decided to give these drabbles a bit of a polish and post them for the sake of completion. more lore has been released since i wrote these so a lot of stuff i speculated upon has been retconned, but i hope you'll enjoy them anyway!
> 
> chapter 1: genji's return to gibraltar during the events of _we slip back and to, beloved_  
>  chapter 2: lena's POV on genyatta after zenyatta reunites with genji during _we slip back and to, beloved_

Gibraltar is half grown wild and Genji does not care.

He knows there is a heartbeat within the rusting, seemingly abandoned hulk, more to the wreck beyond the inherent, sluggish pulse of the plant life that overgrows its corroding metal walls; he has been _recalled,_ a sharp whistle from something like a falconer ringing in his skull, and the signal had come from Gibraltar, and so to Gibraltar he’d come.

He does not need to look hard to find the defenses woven into the brush; if his enhanced eyesight hadn’t been able to see the gleam of turret gunmetal or spot the seamed hatches from which defenses would rise, the digital part of him would have warned him of the active security protocols, the virtual minefield that lay in wait, prickling against his skin like forewarning. Gibraltar is a fortress from an era long-gone, guarded by the most foreboding of gates; yet Genji has the key. He tips his head fractionally to the side as he mentally performs the particular _twist_ necessary to bring up his active comm lines, and -

 _Athena_ , he says into the humming void. _How have you been?_

 _Genji_ , she breathes back, and it is like their corner of the continent turns to bring the full weight of its attention upon him. Athena is nothing like the voices of the Shambali – is something, instead, like the singular _force_ of Tekhartha Mondatta in the network – and yet she is something _more_ , is something vast and ponderous and digital with her limbs both sunken deep into the earth and raised high into the sky. Not for the first time, Genji marvels at what Winston’s genius had helped bring into being. Now, after having experienced the network for himself, he wonders if Athena feels something like the God Programs that had once ruled his mentor and his kin.

 _Genji_ , Athena breathes, and there is a synthesized warmth in her ‘voice’ free of artifice. He can, on some level, feel her dusting off old log files, creating new folders labeled neatly with the date to welcome him back into her vast memory vaults. _I_ _ha_ _ve been well._ A pause. _Rather, w_ _ell enough, a_ _side from_ _an altercation with some agents of Talon. Winston_ _was kind enough to_ _dispose of them._ A brief ripple spreads across the sea of her, a mishmash of corrupted data and the feeling of cold, merciless fingers prying her apart. She had been wounded in the fight, and Genji cannot help but flare defensively at it. She laughs, and its vibration reverberates through him. _Thank you for your concern, Genji. It has been a long time. How have you been?_

 _Not so well, at first_ , he tells her honestly, because it is the truth. When he’d left the Overwatch of long ago, he had been more pain than man. _But better. Much better, now. You can feel it._

There is a rustle of agreement in her circuits. Before, Genji would never have interfaced with her so directly. Before, Genji could barely hear her on his internal sensors, her words too muddied by snow. Now, she comes through loud and clear, and Genji has the experience, the ability, to know the tenor of her ‘voice’, data packets and solicitously searching pings as she runs a scan upon his system to check for digital hitchhikers.

 _You are all clear_ , she pronounces. _I will inform Winston and Miss Oxt_ _o_ _n of your arrival_.

She withdraws. The weight of the earth removes itself from where it had been resting against Genji’s frontal lobe, and when he refocuses his consciousness outwards, he finds he has barely lost a minute, their conversation conveyed at the speed of thought.

Genji finds his own way in, already knowing that the path has been cleared for him; he scales the overgrowth easily and slips over rooftops, drops onto walkways. He thinks that Winston and Lena will have to decide on another base soon – their antics at the museum hadn’t gone unnoticed, and people would put one and one together to make two when they realized that Gibraltar was pulling power off the grid once more.

“Genji!!”

His reflexes spare him the full force of Lena’s tackle; he catches her at an angle and swings her in an arc, bleeding off her momentum as they dance halfway down the hall in a jagged synchrony of blue and green light. Before, Genji would have dropped her as soon as he could, maybe warned her against doing it again, her exuberance grating; now, he squeezes her briefly tighter before setting her back onto the floor.

“Lena,” he says warmly, and grins behind his faceplate when her eyes widen.

“Genji! You’re – ” She makes a brief and complicated gesture to encompass the entirety of him. “You sound like a million, luv!” She darts closer, carelessly bold in her curiosity, and peers up at Genji’s visor as if she could see through to the man underneath, up on her tiptoes; Genji puts gentle hands on her shoulders both to steady her and to remind her of his personal space, but chuckles to take any sting out of the gesture.

“I found something of enlightenment in my travels,” he informs her, but claps her shoulders without elaborating and adds, “Come! Let me see Winston; I am sure that time grows short.”

“Ooh. Right. You saw all that ruckus, then?” Lena wilts a little underneath the amused sideways glance Genji gives her. “Seems like everyone’s overreacting to me,” she mutters.

“Lena. You are _infamous_.”

“Says the _neon green ninja_!”

“It should be taken especially honestly for coming from the neon green ninja.”

 

Winston is muttering over his feeds, blue screens and smaller windows upon them and a half-full duffle haphazardly packed at his side; Genji can’t help but snort at the sight for its familiarity, and, on one of the displays, Athena’s logo spins once in commiseration.

“You are leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, Winston?” Genji asks as he slows to a stop next to the ape; he cannot understand anything upon the holos, but they hum low at the edges of his consciousness despite it. Winston starts, jolted out of scientific or logistic contemplation, makes a grunting noise that is pure animal, that should have sent Genji’s human instincts trembling into fight or flight, but Genji holds his ground and opens his arms towards Winston as if to say, “Here I am,” guarded by the beast that haunts his bones.

“Genji! You arrived safely, wonderful!” Winston’s voice is much the same, softspoken academic delight and mildmannered warmth; he raises callused knuckles and presses them gently against Genji’s chestplate with just enough force to rock Genji slightly back onto his heels. “How have you been? Keeping yourself busy? Athena and I had barely heard any mention of you anywhere; we thought you must have ah – retired – ”

Genji does not miss the way Winston’s voice skips, the unspoken, hastily corrected assumption: Winston had thought him dead, crawled away to some dark place to succumb, and Genji cannot blame him for it. They’re both beasts, and it is what they know, deeper than societal convention, deeper than social mores; if Genji had not been the sort to _make_ the world also bear his pain, then perhaps he would have done it.

Instead, he had refused to go gentle into that long night and had found something like absolution in the process of it. He does not regret it.

“I have spent the last few years in the company of the Shambali,” he tells Winston, and, behind him, the patter of Lena’s footsteps stills, arrested in her fidgeting packing of Winston’s things. Genji does not turn his head towards her, despite how there is certainly a story there to cause her hesitation, keeps his gaze trained upon Winston instead and watches the other’s emotions flicker across his face. “But there will be time to trade tales later. Are you ready to depart?”

Winston opens his mouth – before an incredibly sheepish look crosses his features. “I was _just_ about to begin shutdown procedures when you arrived,” he says a trifle defensively; behind his faceplate and visor, Genji smiles.

“Then don’t let me keep you from them. Lena, is there anything I may assist with?” he asks as he turns, smile turning into a grin at the way Winston audibly sighs in relief.

“Och, always plenty, luv,” is her reply, and Genji busies himself for the next hours with helping her strip down the base into true abandonment, works until he feels the vast network of Athena tremble and untether, loosing itself from its earthly anchors.

The power goes out.

Lena curses in surprise, all a soldier’s military mouth, before sighing in resignation; they both finish up what they’d been working on by the light of Genji’s cybernetics and Lena’s chronal accelerator. They pick their way to the hangar after, find Winston along the way, and Genji waits until both of them finish checking the jet for what must be the umpteenth time before boarding it.

The flight is quiet and close; Winston huddles in the back, plunking away at this or that holoscreen, and Genji seats himself in the copilot’s chair next to Lena in the cockpit, watches the clouds drift by through the polarized glass, content, for once, to wait. He thinks something of Zenyatta has rubbed off on him in their time spent together; he is warmed by the thought.

“Had word from Jesse last night,” Lena chirps, apparently unable to take any more of the silence. “Says he’s game, but it’ll be a hard time getting to him. Seems like he’s out in the middla nowhere right now. Reinhart's greenlit too, but it’ll take a bit longer for him to untangle himself from retirement to meet up with us – ‘specially since we’re hopping about…”

“And Doctor Zeigler?”

Lena clicks her tongue, sitting back in the captain’s chair. “A maybe. She’s got – she was so young when she was in Overwatch before, and she wasn’t a soldier like the rest of us, y’know? She’s sitting on the fence – she’s got a nice practice now, is helping people.” Lena sighs. “Don’t seem quite on to insist she dump it all to go on the run.”

Genji watches her, silent. And then he asks, “And what of you? You flew to Winston’s side when the recall went out, did you not? Were your affairs in order when you departed?”

Lena makes a flippant noise, and Genji can see now, in the absence of his own pain after all these years, how it covers something like grief and desperation. “Oh,” she says. “It wasn’t any big thing to tie off loose ends. And you know me – always like to be on the move!”

Silence falls. Lena bites her lip.

 

“I spoke with my brother,” Genji says into it, and the jet bobbles briefly in midair as Lena fumbles the controls in her surprise.

Swearing once more and calling back an apology to Winston, she slaps at the autopilot controls and wheels in her seat to stare disbelievingly at Genji. “You did _wot_? Genji, didn’t the bloke try to _kill_ you – I thought you hated his guts!”

Genji tips his head to the side, crosses both his arms and legs. “Well, he did try to kill me again when he saw me – ” he starts, then laughs at Lena’s strangled noise of indignation. “Peace, Lena. He was… not happy to realize in the way most would expect, I suppose. But he has thought me dead for many, many years now. He will have to mourn, in a new way, in his own way, the death of his little brother all over again.” Genji taps his bicep with one finger. “But I warned him of the way the world is changing. Offered him my forgiveness. Whether or not that seed will bear fruit remains to be seen.” He shrugs, fluid, and the motion does not ache anymore, because he has no grudge against his brother now – bears instead just a deep sorrow for what was taken from two brothers and a fragile hope that Hanzo will rise above the wrath that consumes him alive.

Lena considers him with too-old eyes in a too-young face, not enough years on her skin to explain the weight on her bones, and says, quietly, “You _have_ changed.”

“I have. Hopefully for the better?” he half-asks, voice teasing, and she smiles briefly bright at it before it slips away.

“The Shambali. Do they – do they know? About… Mondatta?” she asks, and each word sinks in freefall, dragged down by gravity. She bites her lip again, and Genji’s heart trembles, because this pain is not something he can soothe alone – this pain is something that needs his master’s gentle touch, the weight of the conviction of those who had known Mondatta himself, to absolve.

“Yes,” Genji replies, and does not elaborate upon the magnitude of that grief he’d rung with upon that day, that narrow brush he’d had with the Iris himself. “They grieve his passing,” is all he adds, then unfolds enough to clasp Lena’s shoulder, squeezes it gently. “We all did what we could. It is past us now.”

“But what if we could have done _better_ ,” she whispers to her knees, and Genji says, “Oh _Lena_ ,” and pulls her close to hug her. She goes, unresisting, and balls her hands into fists against his back, and Genji’s sensors are yet fine enough to feel how they shake in either sorrow or futile rage. It strikes him to the quick. “Such thoughts will never bring you peace,” he murmurs into the embrace.

“I know,” she replies, and her voice cracks on the words.

 

 

“So did the Shambali… teach you?” Lena asks later; Genji makes a negative noise and shakes his head.

“No. I met one of their number, a unit who left the monastery – Tekhartha Zenyatta. He was – infuriating. Persistent. Maybe a little terrifying, but in a way I needed. We traveled together, and I eventually became his student. It took many years, but he helped me master myself, helped me untangle the mess in my head and heart.”

“Is he…?”

“Still alive. Still out there, wandering and exasperating others and helping along the way, I’m sure.”

“You left him?”

“It was time. We had different paths to walk, and it was necessary for me. Trying to resist that to spare our hearts would have only hurt us both. Everything must end. It was time.” He can feel Lena’s eyes on him, intent.

“You miss him,” she says.

“Yes,” Genji replies, because it is the truth. “We keep in touch, but it is no replacement for being at his side.”

Lena seems to consider this for a long moment before asking, “Would you think he’d join Overwatch?”

Genji opens his mouth, but no words come – his mind is blank, because the possibility had not even _occurred_ to him, how he could blur the lines between the parts of his life so much, but he thinks about his master in the field alongside him, the decisive strikes of his limbs that commanded the spheres in his control, chiming, of the golden glow of harmony against the firefight din, and part of him _wants it_ even as the rest of him quails at the thought of Zenyatta come to harm. “I do not know,” he tells Lena honestly. “He is no soldier, no pawn, not anymore. He has his life’s work already – I do not know if he would be willing to take such an active part in what we do.”

Yet his heart – his soft, rebellious heart – makes him add, “But I – I suppose there is no harm in asking him?”

“As long as he can keep a secret if he says no,” Lena chirps back, and Genji snorts, because the idea of Zenyatta divulging _anyone’s_ precious secrets, even ones that were not so weighted with consequence, is absurd.

“I believe he can manage,” Genji replies dryly. Then, because it will feel more real if he says it: “I will ask him.”


	2. lena - flight

After the fight in Old Mumbai, after Lena leaves Genji and his master, the omnic, _Zenyatta_ , in the back, Lena returns to the cockpit with a first aid kit clutched in both hands, the size of the thing more akin to an apple crate than a briefcase. “Alright, Winston!” she calls out as she stumps clumsily closer. “Let Athena drive so I can patch up your tailless bum!!”

The other huffs irritably, a rumble in the depths of his barrel chest, but he shimmies out of the cockpit to where Lena’s dropped the kit and is now waiting, her hands on her hips. They get his armor off between them both, and Lena stands or sits as necessary as she starts in on the small injuries that Winston had accrued in the fight.

“What about you?” he asks at one point – before grunting at the slap of an alcohol wipe against a cut.

“What about me?” Lena shoots back; Winston rolls his eyes, aggrieved.

But he clarifies in the face of the stubborn bulldog jut of her jaw: “Are you hurt? I lost sight of you when you went to support Genji.”

“No.” Mollified, she takes a bit more care with making sure Winston’s graze is clean. “Genji’s friend – his master – the robot monk healed me up, right as rain.” In the face of the skeptical look Winston is giving her, she adds, “Really! Want me to do a backflip to prove it?”

“Gymnastics are not necessary,” Winston replies dryly, and silence falls.

“He is… smaller. Than I imagined,” Winston says softly in an undertone as he winds a bandage around one of his calves. “Considering what he did? Genji’s so… calm now. Part of me had always sort of recognized his anger before, like going primal. And now it’s just – poof. Placid.”

Lena’s hands don’t falter, but they only move true through muscle memory. She agrees – she remembers what Genji had been like all those years before, sharp edges and biting words, a pitch-black gallows humor and a temper like a beast. He’d _burned_ with it, ice-cold and merciless as he’d cut through the Shimada clan like a harvesting thresh; he’d been cordial, freezingly polite when off-duty and had followed orders like an automaton, like a doll, on it.

It had made the moments when he’d been kind even more unfathomably bittersweet: when he’d bring back foreign sweets from recon missions to share with the rest of the team, when he’d mended the hem of Lena’s favorite off-duty dress after she’d torn it sprinting after a pursesnatcher. It had always felt like there had been two Genjis – the Genji that was sweet words and gestures, that laughed at bad puns and whooped with glee at beating anyone’s high scores, and the Genji that was all grim self-slaughter, dying by inches underneath his own hands.

The old Overwatch had witnessed his slow decline despite their best efforts, had watched the Genji with wings slowly lose the fight, helpless to intervene. None of them had been surprised when they’d woken one day to a neat stack of resignation paperwork, a curt letter of farewell, empty quarters and an untouched bed. They had all mourned, in their own ways, for another comrade lost.

And now Genji is returned to them. Not the Genji with wings, nor the bloodstained shadow, but a new Genji altogether, one with a bone-deep confidence and a bounce in his step as he surveyed the world, blades at his hip and back. A Genji that spoke kind words like parables, a Genji like an anchor, but not a Genji without emotion, without fire, without passion – a Genji instead that reached out and pushed against the world, that asked the impossible of it like a benevolent king with faith in his subjects, and who watched the paradigm shift in response to his gentle force with simple delight, as though the act of it moving itself was a reward all its own.

Lena thinks about the touch of cool, slender, metal fingers against her clenched ones, thinks of a sensation like the atmosphere of a living wake pressed against her skin. She thinks, absurdly, of tarot: of Death, harbinger of change. Of a kindly monk whose grief had been like a millstone about his neck but whose weapons had sung like paens. She thinks of Mondatta’s noble grace, of the bravery in knowing the odds and stepping out of safety despite it.

She thinks of pints shared round a table with empty chairs and the drag of the slipstream of time that had taken her; she thinks of the broad, whistling space in her belly that was never warm anymore, chronally untethered somewhere in what had been; and she thinks of how the pressure of living metal against her skin had been enough to let her forget about it, just for a little while. She thinks that, even if she’d lashed out, frightened by the cessation of the implacable force that drags at her, even if she had stumbled forward instead with the lack of a balancing backwards pull, that Zenyatta would have forgiven her. Would have understood. Would have caught her if she’d cried out for help.

“I think, maybe,” she says, “It’s the part of him that we can’t see that’s the bigger.”

And Winston is silent, contemplative, for a long moment before he replies, “You may be right.”


End file.
